thread: 2009-04-27 : Dice & Cloud: a Symmetry
On 2009-04-28, Jono wrote:
I'm de-lurking.
> Anyone playing along at home want to take a guess as to the
> outcome of this design choice in play? Or share their
> experience playing it?
My experience playing: The missions were intense. Nail-biting. But it was really vague what was going on. Little more than a few glimpses of scenery, aliens, robots in action. Motifs were repeated a lot, details were lacking. Aliens and robots alike were narrated doing cool moves, but it was just color. Everything had a feeling of disconnect, floating in white space. When playing my pilot, I was very focused on how to allocate my dice, secondarily focused on making my robot sound cool, minorly focused on anything else. I had butterflies in my stomach every time I rolled.
Interludes were relaxing, almost sleepy. I was focused on immersing into character. There were some really good characterizations and some fun dialogue, but with little or no conflict it felt aimless at times. The setting felt more concrete, because we were always in the same place (the Field Museum in Chicago), and it mattered what you said to people because they would remember it later. When playing my pilot, I had some agendas I wanted to pursue, but I was reluctant to push too hard on other characters because I didn't want to threaten my relationships, so I backed down from potential conflicts a lot.
The intensity plus vagueness of the missions felt dreamlike. The aimlessness plus concreteness of the interludes felt like mundane reality.
Was this intentional? Was it a happy accident?
